He sat down with his back to a tree.
leaned his head against the trunk, and carefully noted the pattern of branches that marked the position of the Sun. Then he took from his pouch the lunch Elsa had given him—four radishes, a couple of crackers, and a smoked fish.
Too late, he realized that he should have kept the radishes till last, to clear his palate of the lingering taste of the fish. He did have a water bottle, hollowed from a sapling stem—gourds had been planted, but were less than half grown—but it held only a few mouthfuls. He had drunk several times from streams crossed during his wanderings. Better keep what he had, for now, not knowing when he would next come to water that was fit to drink.
The Sun had crawled just perceptibly down the sky. It appeared that the opposite side of the valley lay more or less west. Which meant if he turned left along the valley bottom he would be going more or less south. He heaved himself to his feet and set off.
This time he faithfully followed the teaching of the Boy Scout Handbook, lining up his route from one tree to another, scratching arrows on the ground at every branch of the trail, and remembering to check his position by the Sun. The need to keep going in a straight line took him through patches of scratchy horsetails and thickets of some whiplike plant that lashed back at him when pushed aside, and finally into a messy and sour-smelling swamp… from which he emerged after most of an hour onto a slope of bare rock backed by a basalt cliff, above which loomed the distant outline of Observatory Hill.
It was a relief. Of course it was. On the other hand he was bloody tired and it was now mid-afternoon. It would take him two hours at least to get back to base, and the party from Lake Possible might well be there already, now. Whatever he did now, some interfering youngster was going to realize that he had deliberately tricked them and gone exploring by himself, which would make him the big winner at How Dumb Can You Get… unless he had something to show for it.
There were a good many fallen branches around, and towards the top of the slope they were dry. Craile assembled materials for a fire, built a small pyramid of twigs and crumbled bark, and focused the sunlight on it with his burning-glass (official issue—matches were reserved for emergencies on Indication One). He got a glow after a minute or so, fanned it to a flame, and fed it carefully.
It took much longer than he expected for the fire to burn down. When, finally, he had a good—fairly good—bed of red coals, he spread his four pathetic little lumps on the hot rock, raked ash over them with a stick, and piled the red coals on top.
Then, for lack of anything to do otherwise, he continued to crouch beside the fire. Presently a drop of sweat fell from his nose, and sizzled. Craile moved away a few feet and for the first time began to notice the clearing as something other than a good place to light a fire.
The area of rock was about the size of a soccer field and variegated by damp hummocks of moss, plus the occasional clump of horsetails growing out of a crack. The upper end was cut off sharply by the cliff, which was about twenty feet high. Elsewhere the rock was bordered by forest. This was much the same here as elsewhere, except that the trees appeared to be in poor condition. There were a good many fallen trunks and stumps with splintered tops, as though the quite moderate winds of Indication One had been too much for them.
Altogether, the place made a rather dismal impression; though that could be because he was strongly conscious that the swamp through which he had waded to get here lurked at the lower end of the slope.
The fire was a heap of gray ash, with charcoal poking through in places. Craile wondered how long it took to cook roots this way. Come to that, he didn’t know how long they had been baking; he had forgotten to note the position of the Sun when the process began.
He had started his fire feeling that as he could not get back early enough to avoid notice, but on the other hand nobody would actually be waiting for his return, time hardly mattered. However, he had only a vague idea of how long it would take to reach base. The amount of fuss would be doubled or trebled if he got back after dark. Not to mention the possibility of falling off, into or down some part of the landscape…
He raked one of the roots out of the fire and knocked the ash off it. Small enough to begin with, it had shrunk almost to nothing. He got out his knife—his most important possession, kept tethered to his belt by a leather thong—and prodded the thing. The tip of the smaller blade went into it easily enough.
Craile cut the root in half.
Color and texture were the same all the way through. Did that mean it was cooked? He cut off a piece, peeled away the remaining skin and blew on it till it felt cool enough to put in his mouth.
There were other dangers. By the middle of the Cretaceous, land plants had been eaten by land animals for about a hundred and fifty million years; quite enough time for the plants to evolve a few chemical protections. Cyanide, for instance. The lethal stuff had to be locked into some relatively harmless molecule, to stop it killing the parent cell, and most of it stayed that way until mixed with stomach acid; but the cooking process usually released enough to warn off anyone with a sense of smell. He sniffed heartily. No odor of bitter almonds here.
The other chief group of plant poisons, the toxic alkaloids, all tasted bitter. Craile believed—hoped—that quantities too small to register on the taste buds were also too small to be harmful. He licked the bit of root. No bitterness; in fact no taste at all. He put it cautiously into his mouth Chewed, it took on faint overtones of the fermented gruel fed to children in parts of Africa. Europeans tended to compare the flavor to that of wallpaper paste, though when and why they had tasted that was never explained.
He went on chewing. He would have to swallow the stuff some time, if this experiment was to be of any use, but there was no hurry about it.
What the hell—? His tongue, and the roof of his mouth were stinging furiously. It felt as though the mush he was chewing contained one of the stronger acids—but there was no sour taste.
Craile spat, vigorously; uncorked his water-bottle, washed his mouth, and spat again, repeating the process until he had drained the bottle. His tongue and palate continued to sting. Hurriedly he examined himself for other in effects; but he was not nauseated, or dizzy, his extremities were not numb, his vision was OK…
A memory surfaced, of having gone through this process before, thirty or forty years ago… and, yes, because of similar symptoms. The curator of a botanical garden somewhere—Singapore? Rio? Papua?—had given him a fruit like an outsize pinecone with green scales. One end was ripe and tasted like pineapple; the other… Visible differences should have warned him, but he went ahead and cut off a slice. After a couple of mouthfuls his mouth had felt as though he had been eating stinging nettles, raw.
The curator had explained, holding back laughter, that until it ripened the fruit was full of tiny needle-shaped crystals which penetrated the soft tissues of the mouth. In a couple of days they would dissolve; meanwhile there was nothing to be done. Except remember that only those segments of a ceriman that had separated from one another were good to eat.
And, dammit, he had been told often enough in New Guinea that taro roots must be cooked for a long time or they made the mouth sore. The cause was the same, according to the books; minute crystals of calcium oxalate. He had forgotten to check for that form of vegetable self-defense.
Craile raked the rest of the roots out of the fire. He was tempted to throw the shriveled little objects away and forget the whole thing. Instead, he wandered over to the nearest patch of forest until he found leaves large enough to wrap them in, then stowed them in his pouch.